Ink

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Okay, the title is a gross exaggeration since I certainly hope to print CD packaging again, but I've learned some valuable lessons in what not to do next time and I'm enjoying my DFW shoutout. Basically everything that could go wrong did, including getting this post out - I've been looking for parts of this to photograph for 2 weeks now! All in all I think the finished product is swell, especially for a first time effort.

So many, many months ago now I printed CD packages for my friend Matt Schickele's newest album. We used arigato packs from Stumptown printers because Matt already knew he wanted to use recycled stock and he didn't want to have to deal with glue or anything too tricky. We looked around for comparison's sake, but Stumptown really seemed like the cheapest, best option for what we wanted. Matt is also responsible for the design, and I think the finished design is the 3rd draft of us going back and forth on what would and wouldn't work for letterpress printing. His first design included a dark green wash over the entire cover, so that was obviously problematic for letterpress. I do believe I'm getting better at explaining to clients what does or doesn't work for letterpress printing, and I told Matt the likely result of trying to print that large a solid and then sent him images of other peoples' results doing that on similar and stronger presses.

Since we were trying to keep costs down it needed to be printed on the Pearl and not a design for which I'd have to rent time on a Vandercook. Another part of my cost saving measures was convincing Glendon to do the blocks for me on the laser cutter. Honestly, this is where the majority of problems came from, and with non-friend and non-flexible clients, I will be purchasing plates in the future and prices will just have to be higher. There were a couple problems caused by having the blocks made on the laser cutter, but the simplest one is that Glendon really didn't have time to do this. I'm not sure if he was just too accommodating to say no to me, or if he just didn't realize how busy both he and the laser cutter would be. Neither of us realized how time consuming these particular plates would be - or how many times we'd have to re-do them! Naturally, once word got around his department of what the laser cutter could do, people started lining up to have their projects printed, so there isn't tons of downtime for my personal jobs during official hours of operation. Quite reasonable, of course, but it meant that Glendon had to stay late to do my plates, which was often hard to schedule as he does have other commitments. Since there were six blocks, and each takes 30 minutes or so (I think), and since he had to re-do many of them (details follow), this was a long process.

So yes, that's the whole time management issue, but the big problem was with the wood blocks themselves. Sort of. Well, there was lots of user error too, but I blame the wood! That plywood blend we've been using works very well for larger, bolder typefaces and images, but we should have listened to Winking Cat Press when he said that he didn't like plywood. We should have thought a bit more about why he doesn't like plywood and about the thickness of the lines and typefaces in the design I was preparing to print. I'd just like to confirm for everyone that plywood, even really high quality plywood, is not the way to go for type smaller than, say 10pt. Some of the first blocks Glendon cut looked weirdly muddy or wavy and printed that way too, and with the super small font, the counters of the letters weren't deep enough and would fill with ink, even if I had very little on the press.

We actually had to go back and change the thickness of the song numbering because the "1" was so thin that Glendon could not cut it. He did it twice and both times it basically crumbled if you looked at it. Glendon ended up having to play around with the depth the laser was cutting or how large a shoulder to add more than we bargained for, resulting in too many do-overs. Quite a few of the blocks got random letters smushed or broken here or there between the time they were cut and when they got to me, and he'd have to redo the entire block then as well. Since we also had to mount them onto other wood to be type high and then chisel off part of the block's non-printing face (or else a bit of it would, on occasion, print too), there were some regrettable chisel accidents, resulting in more waste. We wasted a lot of wood, and the environmentalist in me feels ashamed. I've bought a few of the expensive type high maple wood blocks, and we'll do a bit more experimenting - perhaps those will go more smoothly. Glendon actually has some very nice cherry wood, but it's taller than .918" and he doesn't have any way to bring it down to type high.

Now that I've explained all the horrible parts about our DIY, I must say that cutting the blocks ourselves using found/free materials did come in handy exactly three times. Once was when Matt realized he'd left off a production credit and copyright information, and Glendon was able to quickly re-cut that block. It would have been expensive to resend to a platemaker and Matt would have had to eat that cost. The other two times were when I, behaving like a complete moron, smashed two different plates with a gripper bar (the same gripper each time). The first time I did this was right at the beginning of the print run, and I had just carefully reset all the gauge pins but neglected to move the gripper bars further apart. I was doing a test impression and slowly turning the flywheel by hand when I heard this crunching noise that I've never heard before. The crunching was the gripper compressing the wood block. Of course I stopped and backed the platen away as soon as I heard the noise, but it was too late. That gripper is strong, man; it squished that wood like it was a marshmallow. The second time I did this, on the final block of the whole print run, I really thought I'd learned my lesson, and I had in fact adjusted the grippers properly, but then I moved the block in the chase by a centimeter or something. I ended up forgetting to recheck the gripper, and I smashed the first letters in three lines at the very edge of the plate. Very frustrating. So I would have had to eat the cost of two new plates, but I believe that I may now have learned my lesson.

So that's most of the drama with the plates, except for one final thing, which actually has a happy ending. I was doing the very last run, and I had about an hour and a half to get it done before work, and I REALLY wanted to get it done that day and hand them all over to Matt the next day. For once, everything was going well, and I was listening to NPR and feeding the cases one after another, boom, boom, boom. I'd gotten about half way through my stack of 190 when I noticed a small bit of wood on the rollers as they were returning to the ink disk from the form. I pulled the throwoff lever (I love the throwoff), and plucked the bit of wood from the roller, and noticed that it was the letter "y." Yes, the letter "y" from the "by" in the middle line of the three lines of production credits had somehow completely come off, all by itself - the rest of the plate looked perfect.

Now this is the same plate that Glendon had to re-cut with the extra production credit (and he'd had to cut it twice too), and it's also the same plate, and the same section of the plate where I'd smashed three letters just a day before, causing Glendon to re-cut the plate again. AND NOW THIS ONE RANDOM LETTER JUST POPS OFF!? How is that even possible - thank you plywood!? Amazingly I kept my head, and decided to try and glue the letter back on. Apparently the last few years of bookbinding and messing about with tiny pieces of type have paid off because I actually popped it right back in place on the first try, and it was only after I called Glendon to get his opinion of how long I should wait for it to dry and brag about my dexterity that he reminded me that there was crazy glue on the kitchen table. It might have been better to use that than my bookbinding glue. So I ended up waiting a week to finish up, but when I finally did, the plate behaved fine and I was all done in an hour. I was also able to give Matt the half that were finished when I had originally planned since he didn't need all of them at once anyway. Hooray for happy endings.

As I mentioned above, I split the design into 6 printing plates. This may have been overly cautious, but since this was all so new to me (the weird size and the stock), I wanted to be sure everything printed properly. Obviously the solids needed to be separated from the text, so that's one blue plate right there. Perhaps I could have printed the large orange solid with the two smaller orange solids on one plate, but I wasn't sure if the Pearl, operating with only two rollers, would have the strength or the ink coverage capability for that, so that's two more plates, current total: three. The orange text plate makes four. Finally, the blue text was placed just far enough apart so that I thought it should be split into two sections as well for a grand total of six. Yikes, right?

This is where I need to give a plug for transparency sheets. Do you guys remember those? From high school with over-head projectors? Well they are the best tool for registration, and I love them. You just print out your proof on a transparency and then you can line up your printed proofs as they come off the press. Makes it easy peasy. I'm kind of wondering how much longer the sheets will be around though. Does anyone ever use overhead projectors anymore in this age of powerpoint? Will transparency paper go the way of the dodo bird and the Polaroid?

Okay, printing. Printing the blue text went pretty well except for the aforementioned problems. The only other hiccup was lining up the text on the edges of the CD case. This is actually another block I had to redo because our original measurements were somehow off (which is weird since Matt got the template from Stumptown) and the two bits of text were too close to each other. I solved this by chiseling off the text from one side and printing the rest of the block. Since we'd done another version of that block which had other problems (that honestly I can't even remember at this point), I chiseled everything else off of that block and just printed the remaining edge text. Obviously getting the registration perfect on those edges was a huge bitch and lining up the orange and blue text was tricky. Mostly it worked but sometimes it...was not the best alignment in the world. But a little unevenness isn't too bad; gives it that 'handmade' look?

The orange ink had been very difficult to mix, and I'd ended up having to add massive amounts of transparent and opaque white so that it wouldn't be carroty-red. Matt really wanted the resulting bright orange, but it was rather transparent and quite goopy which proved difficult to work with on occasion. The instruments next to the performers' names were originally supposed to be orange, but the ink was so light that it was almost illegible and we switched that text to blue. While the album title and the side text on the CD are sometimes difficult to read, I do think they look right in most lights. I did have to double ink all the orange text however.

Now printing those solids is something I really wanted to discuss, partly because it's probably more useful to most of you (since I think most people aren't making their own blocks with a laser cutter). The results from this print run are also probably a pretty good marker of what my press is capable of right now, so I must write it down for posterity. Obviously the results will change if I use a different paper stock, get a third roller or perhaps even all new rollers (speaking of, how can you tell when you need new rollers? Is it a if you have to ask, you don't need them because you would know by your crappy prints type of thing?).

Anyway, so if you look at my pictures, you see nice, fairly solid coverage, right? Why yes, yes you do, BUT ladies and gentlemen, don't go thinking that you or I can just pop our paper in and print that way, oh no! That was the result of my complete insanity - DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. That nice solid coverage is the result of me inking the plate a couple times before printing and then overprinting anywhere between two and six times. And that's with packing and proper makeready. The solid area is just so large for both images, and the recycled stock was not super-receptive to cushy printing. I think with a Vandercook or a Heidelberg it wouldn't be an issue, but for my own mental health I need to be more aware of my press' limits. On certain prints you can kind of tell at the edges that I printed each multiple times, but I honestly like the effect and I'm pleased with how well the coverage turned out.

Um, yeah. So that's how I printed those way back in October. It took 8 months to post this because it's the longest post in the world. Does length make up for delay? I also decided that it was time to get more serious about professional picture taking, and that took a while to procrastinate. If you have comments/tips about that (or anything), I'd love to hear it.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Or at least no hands constantly moving the throw-off between every impression, and no inadvertent double inking of the form while said hands fumble with feeding the paper while treadling. Yes, thank you very much, it looks as though I've finally gotten the hang of...printing on the Pearl?

I think I wrote before about the trouble I've been having feeding the paper in time to print the next impression while also treadling and removing the just-printed paper and examining it. Too much multi-tasking or a lack of coordination or something. I just couldn't do it all in the three rotations it takes for the Pearl to print. What I've been doing is pulling the throw-off after every impression so that I would have extra time to feed the paper and examine the previous print. Of course six rotations was way too much time and I'd end up standing around for a few seconds. I think 4 or 4.5 rotations would have been perfect. Since the Pearl was going through the rotations twice, the form was also being inked twice, which really could have been disastrous to the quality of my printing. Fortunately(?) I still consistently under-ink the press pretty much all the time, so I just kept it under-inked instead of adding more ink like I normally do. It worked, but it was stupid.

Anyway, I've finally gotten the hang of it. Part of it is certainly just practice and an increased familiarity with my lovely little press. I'm now more comfortable judging the right amount of pressure and speed to exert on the treadle, so the press moves just fast enough for me to properly feed and print. I think my earlier problem was partly caused by inexperience: I'd either treadle the press too fast for my feeding speed or I'd treadle so slowly that the press wouldn't maintain momentum. Rich also left some helpful tips in the comments of an earlier post where I was complaining about my feeding difficulty. Now I do sort of lean my body against the feed board while treadling and feeding, and it does help, although I'm not sure why. The feed board and the iron arms connecting it to the press don't look all that strong, but they seem to be plenty hardy enough to support part of my weight. I think that my upper body is leaning against the feedboard and my lower body is standing on the one leg I have planted firmly on the floor, and this leaves the other leg to treadle without interference or interruption. I've really got to get some of those tension mats though because that foot on the floor can get really sore after a day of printing.

I think one important factor to successfully printing on the Pearl that wasn't so vital with my tabletops is proper setting of gauge pins. Obviously on a press without momentum, you can set the gauge pins however you want, take all the time you need to place the stock into the pins, and it doesn't really matter how secure the gauge pins are since you control how quickly the press closes. On a treadled press (or a motorized one), you really have to set those guides up so that you can feed the paper into them in a fluid motion because if the guides move or the paper gets caught somewhere, you don't really have time to correct it before the platen starts to close. I'll admit that I was often lazy with gauge pins on the Kelseys, and I would only cut the front slit and not the back to doubly secure the quad guides to the tympan. Now that I've started doing that on the Pearl, registration works much better, and cutting that second slit is very simple. I'm not really sure why I made it out to be difficult. It's also important (duh!) to have the side guide set up, not just as a printing guide for registration (like on a tabletop), but also to hold the stock in place. I know, this seems kinda obvious to those of you who mostly use larger presses, but really, I now have a new appreciation for using gauge pins by the book.

Finally, I think it also helps that I'm currently printing on a harder stock than normal. The last big project I printed was on Lettra and that 100% cotton paper totally sticks together and dries out your hands. I suppose we'll see if this rock star feeding continues the next time I try to print on cotton paper.

Monday, September 22, 2008

So it's been a while since my last post, and that's because there's been a bit of a printing break recently. Instead of printing, I've been getting a new day job (yay! sounds of angels singing!), checking out books from the library on learning Photoshop and, most time-suckingly, watching hours and hours of movies and tv on my brand new Netflix/Roku box thing. It is awesome, and thankfully I'm finally getting a little sick of it. I would say check it out, but perhaps only do so if you don't mind spending every free minute for the next couple weeks glued to the damn thing. I've watched a shocking number of episodes of the L Word and the Dick Van Dyke Show, that's all I'm saying.

Hopefully there will now be a renewed focus on letterpress printing, especially as Josephine needs her cards and apparently, Christmas is coming. Since I'm usually a more buy presents a few days ahead kind of person, this comes as a bit of a shock, but when you are planning to print or otherwise make all presents, planning months ahead is in order. The fancy professional printers already have their 2009 calendars done! Scary.

Sort of to this end, organization has remained a big focus of the Gamewell Press. As I've said before, I only recently got a type cabinet and I have many, many pieces of pied random type. I've sorted much of this (and bought more); the result being that I have a nice little collection of dingbats and ornaments. As part of my organizational process, I recently inked up the press with basic black, and tried to start printing them all onto index cards.

I figured that this would be a good way to figure out what I have and in what point sizes. Maybe it will make it easier to plan projects and hopefully I won't overlook something cool just because it's buried in some heavy little box. It was actually really great to see the above borders printed. I didn't realize there was so much detail in some of them, like the striping of the ribbon in the second to left one on the bottom.

Now one of the main problems newer printers supposedly have is using too much ink. Often on the LetPress Listserv or Briar Press newcomers have problems like this so I can only believe that over-inking is rampant. Apparently I have taken these cautionary tales to heart because I have the exact opposite problem. I consistently under-ink the press - it doesn't even matter which press, my Kelsey, a Vandercook at the CBA, I always under-ink. And somehow, I never believe that I'm doing it. I always think that the impression is off or something, and then when I finally realize that it's my ink coverage and put more ink on, it seems so obvious. There is a certain noise a press makes when it is properly inked, and as soon as you hear it, you know, you know, that you've got it right. This happened again when I was proofing these and I kind of wanted to slap myself when I heard the noise - it's hard to describe - sort of like when you peel back a sticker but smackier, sort of. Anyway, I hereby resolve to really listen for that noise from now on. Below is a picture of an under-inked card and one that is better inked.

Note the busts of two former presidents! Now that's obviously better inking, and these are just proofs. I really wasn't trying much with packing, etc. since I just wanted to do a quick inventory. I'm only about half done, but here's my current favorite (pretty appropriate for too late on a Sunday night).